My Rating ~ Five stars

5-gold-stars

RELEASED: 24 July 2018

Publisher: Harper Teen

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 432

Blurb

It got in us

After receiving an urgent SOS from a work detail on a distant planet, a skeleton crew is dispatched to perform a standard search-and-rescue mission.

Most are dead.

But when the crew arrives, they find an abandoned site, littered with rotten food, discarded weapons…and dead bodies.

Don’t set foot here again.

As they try to piece together who—or what—could have decimated an entire operation, they discover that some things are best left buried—and some monsters are only too ready to awaken.

Review

Thea is an intern, working with microbiologist, Lisbeth Tarlow, for a mining company when they receive an order to respond to a distress call from a mine on another planet. The destination is a mining site where Dr Tarlow grew up, and was the sole survivor of a disaster no-one knows much about. When the crew arrive on Achlys, they are faced with a mine site that has been ransacked and contains only dead bodies. As they try to figure out what happened, Thea comes across a lone survivor, and they all need to decide who to trust and just how many secrets are being kept from them, and by whom.

The first few chapters of Contagion pack a lot of information in, all necessary information, but once the crew arrived on Achlys I don’t think I took a breath for the rest of the book! It was fast paced, suspenseful and just plain scary in some parts. The fear, mistrust of each other and horror felt by the characters almost seeped through the pages. I was there with them the whole way. I had all the emotions towards the crew’s captain – mainly angry ones. I wanted to reach through the pages and strangle her, and I love it when a book can do that to me. From the beginning, Contagion is told from a few different points of view – The lone survivor of the mining camp, Thea the intern and Nova the pilot, so the story covers several angles. It worked really well to increase the feelings of desperation, and to keep me guessing who was really trustworthy and who wasn’t. Contagion is a gripping read I couldn’t put down and I am dying to read the sequel!